April 24, 2006

Can we all use the same micro-formats please ?

I live-blogged the launch of the Structured Blogging initiative during the Syndicate conference in San Francisco, and I could not help noticing that not everyone seemed in its favor. Edgeio (Usual disclaimer: I am advisor, investor and landlord to the company) through co-founder Mike Arrington had pledged support to Structured Blogging and Micro-formats.

Google recently introduced a set of protocols for GoogleBase - GData, and unfortunately these RSS/Atom extensions don't seem to be aligned with already established micro-formats. Richard Mc Manus raised the matter last week, and Edgeio's Matt Kaufman has a good post on the issue, which will hopefully be solved quickly.

Comments

Things are not as bad as they seem.

Firstly "GData" is basically an Atom Store ( http://bitworking.org/news/Google_Data_APIs_Protocol ), combining the Atom syndiciation format and publishing protocol, along with OpenSearch (which I think they should use more http://www.faganfinder.com/wp/2006/04/20/783/ ). So *unlike* what Google usually does (just invent their own namespace such as for Google Base), they actually make use of existing open formats.

On the other hand, along with GData, they also define some "kinds" of data ( http://code.google.com/apis/gdata/common-elements.html ), which like Google Base, they've gone with their own namespace instead of the common open formats. Unlike usual, however, it seems like they may be receptive to our input http://www.unto.net/unto/work/google-data-apis-and-opensearch/#comment-522 , so there's hope :-)